Advances in semi-conductor processing and logic design have permitted an increase in the amount of logic that may be present on integrated circuit devices. As a result, computer system configurations have evolved from a single or multiple integrated circuits in a system to multiple cores and multiple logical processors present on individual integrated circuits. A processor or integrated circuit typically comprises a single processor die, where the processor die may include any number of cores or logical processors.
The ever increasing number of cores and logical processors on integrated circuits enables more software threads to be concurrently executed. However, the increase in the number of software threads that may be executed simultaneously have created problems with synchronizing data shared among the software threads. One common solution to accessing shared data in multiple core or multiple logical processor systems comprises the use of locks to guarantee mutual exclusion across multiple accesses to the shared data. However, the ever increasing ability to execute multiple software threads potentially results in false contention and a serialization of execution.
For example, consider a hash table holding shared data. With a lock system, a programmer may lock the entire hash table, allowing one thread to access the entire hash table. However, throughput and performance of other threads is potentially adversely affected, as they are unable to access any entries in the hash table, until the lock is released. Alternatively, each entry in the hash table may be locked. However, this increases programming complexity, as programmers have to account for more locks within a hash table.
Another data synchronization technique includes the use of transactional memory (TM). Often transactional execution includes speculatively executing a grouping of a plurality of micro-operations, operations, or instructions. In the example above, both threads execute within the hash table, and their accesses are monitored/tracked. If both threads access/alter the same entry, one of the transactions may be aborted to resolve the conflict. One type of transactional execution includes a Software Transactional Memory (STM), where accesses are tracked, conflict resolution is performed, abort tasks are handled, and other transactional tasks are performed in software.
However, the overhead included in performing all of these tasks exclusively in software is potentially expensive. For example, in one implementation of an STM, a load operation in a transaction is logged for validation upon commitment of the transaction. However, subsequent reads to the same location may also be redundantly logged, which potentially wastes execution cycles within a transaction.